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most of the major guerrilla movements in the world, but this one was to turn out to be archetypical and even prophetic. Their strategy was to become one of the major strategies of those fanaticized young men and women of all of the developing world -- and, as it happened, I was the first outsider to see and study it in a Central America that would soon be in flames just because of young people like them.
    We talked for two hours before Humberto, our driver, and I drove back to the hotel in silent satisfaction. Mine, indeed, was so great that I could scarcely contain it. I had no idea why I had been chosen from the list of eight correspondents who had somehow gotten their names to "the movement," but never mind. I had the interview and I had it at the most difficult and dangerous time.
    ***
    It would be nice to say that at times like this I thought only of conveying information to the world, but that, frankly, would not be true. That responsibility is certainly the dedication of my life; but I have to admit that first I felt only the most delighted sense of personal accomplishment. I sat in my simple little room at the Pan American, with its woven Guatemalan spreads and heavy furniture, and laughed aloud out of sheer joy. The laugh seemed to hang for a moment in the silence. Then I walked around and looked at myself in the minor. I walked out on the balcony, and the whole bustling world down on those narrow streets seemed lovable and friendly, even though I had spent most of the day talking with people whose lives were devoted to killing. Such are the crazy little victories of journalists!
    At moments like this the sacrifices one makes to be a foreign correspondent -- husband, children, the house with the view of the lake, the comforts of normalcy, and the reassurances of conformity -- seemed, quite simply, irrelevant. The joy is a matter both of personal transcendence and at the same time of a deep penetration of the world: of an odd sense of movement both ways.
    I wrote the interview -- or it wrote itself, really -- in less than an hour. By then it was still only 8:00 P.M., and the plane to El Salvador, where I had to go in order to file safely, did not leave until 11:30 P.M. So I tucked the story away in my purse, dressed up, and went off to an elegant cocktail party at the American residence given by the American ambassador, John Gordon Mien. I took an almost catlike pleasure in chatting, drinking, and wondering together with my fellow correspondents about where Turcios could be, when all the while I had him quite literally tucked away in my pocketbook.
    A short while later Ambassador Mien, a splendid man, was killed by Turcios's men. By then Turcios also had died, ostensibly in an auto accident. Guatemala in those days was an endless celebration of dying, and I was soon to be tentatively included in the program.
    ***
    Since the Turcios interview was widely published and had worked so well, I expected no trouble at all when Henry Gill and I returned to Guatemala that next fall. But when I telephoned Humberto at home, he sounded a little put-off and strange. "I'm going to be at the hotel at noon," he said hurriedly and with a weak voice, "I'll meet you then."
    It turned out that he was going to be at the hotel for the weekly Rotarian luncheon! Humberto, my guerrilla page, my first revolutionary, my leader into the clandestine labyrinths -- in six miserable months he had been graduated from the university, had been reformed into a bourgeois, had gone into his father's business, and become a Rotarian! My tempestuous lady of the afternoon had become a Tupperware saleswoman!
    The chargé at the embassy cordially warned me of the danger of "what we know you are trying to do."
    The police chief of Guatemala City looked sideways at me and gazed at me for a long time at a public meeting.
    Meanwhile I was having no luck at all in making new contacts. And I was getting nervous.
    By the time two weeks had gone by, I was growing